It’s another glorious April, and that means the broadcast world flocks to Las Vegas, where the National Association of Broadcasters event also attracts a cluster of affiliated conferences, and Backbone figures prominently in several of them.

On Sunday April 7, Backbone and TuneIn will team to broadcast the live proceedings of the Internet Radio industry’s most prominent event, the RAIN Summit (Radio and Internet Newsletter) from the Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. Speakers and panelists include representatives from Pandora, ESPN, TuneIn, SoundExchange and many more.

Starting on Monday, Backbone will be actively recruiting new college (and high school) radio stations to join the expanding IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone. Please stop by to visit our exhibit booth at the Broadcast Education Association’s BEA2013 Conference, also in the Las Vegas Hotel (formerly the Las Vegas Hilton). We’ll show you how schools are taking their stations on the road for live events, using only a Mac and a mic.

And of course, NAB is the most exciting draw in the broadcast world, so we hope to see you there, too.

Be sure to tune into Fisk and Simmons College radio for their perspective on the election.

88.1FM WFSK Presents: Live Election Night Coverage of local, statewide & national races beginning right after the polls close at 7pm. Co-Anchored by Sharon Kay and Ron Wynn, WFSK will present on the ground perspective from key battleground states such as Ohio, Wisconsin & Virginia.

Hear the excitement as the returns come in from around Tennessee and other states. WFSK hopes you get a chance to tune in during the course of this historic election coverage. They stream at www.wfskfm.org or on Dar.fm or TuneIn.

Simmons College will be covering the election also but with a bit more of a slant toward Massachusetts politics because there school is not far from Romney headquarters. The stream at Simmons College Radio or on Dar.fm and TuneIn.

While hurricane Sandy has come and gone its impact is still being felt all of our stations stayed up and on the air. A good number of our college radio stations had school canceled and did not have access to their studios but they all remained on the air. This is enabled by the cloud based design and architecture of Backbone Radio and provides two major benefits.

The first is that your station is always available in the cloud. Your station is not running the servers, we are. And we have designed them to stay up and operational virtually all the time. When there have been outages in the past they are quite small and are often handled without the station’s intervention.

The second is that your studio is mobile. A few of our stations did not have access to their studios so could not broadcast live. If they planned ahead they could have broadcast live from anywhere there was an Internet connection.

Tres Wiggins, Marymount Manhattan: “We were on the air live when we could get an internet connection– but ran on backbone automation otherwise throughout, and working on post-storm coverage now”

Let’s hope the clean up goes well for all of those impacted. With our stations continually on the air they will be out there to bring you updates.

I saw an interesting post on PolicyMic recently by Adam Hogue, where he relates his transition from a college radio broadcaster at Keene State to becoming an NPR listener, like his (egad) father, and the general decline of Radio from its golden era. What jumped off the page to me were his views about how the future of radio seems to be college radio, because it best serves today’s youth. Here are some of the verbatim nuggets that appealed to me:

All around America, there are stations that people take regional pride in. Most of these stations turn out to be college radio stations.

The radio is communication. It is part of our communities, and as long as it continues to evolve with the communities, it will not die.

College radio should be the local voice of local youth. While radio is rapidly losing the young listeners demographic (people ages 12 to 24), I believe that it is the job of college radio to be the community alternative for young people.

College stations need to be out there in the community and they need to stay relevant with their fan-base in order to grow. Young people have time to listen if they are given a reason to.

People should be able to listen to programs from anywhere and enjoy them. Today, radio has the power to be anywhere; it is no longer confined to a frequency alone.

Radio stations need to play music, no matter what the music is, and have local personalities that bring people in and keep them loyal…radio should be a way to learn about new music or just listen to what people have to say about it.

It helps that most college radio stations receive a solid amount of money from the school.… A problem occurs when the school sees radio as outdated or too costly, and the station is sold off to a community.

As I see it, this short list distills down to three main points we need to focus on in order to escape the death spiral that’s enveloping Commercial Radio. Our College Radio stations (IBS Student Radio Network stations and others) need to:

Become an active participant in the community, no matter where your listeners are tuning in from, and

Become monetarily self-sufficient to keep from becoming a burden on their schools’ budgets.

We’re going to need some time to look at each of these points and create a plan of attack. There are other necessary improvement points, to be sure, and I’d like your input on those, as well.

I would like to invite comments, emails and blog posts from interested station managers and faculty advisors. I think it’s time we put our collective network heads together and establish an action plan with some guidelines for how we might go about making these improvements.

There’s no event that’s more exhilarating than Austin’s South by Southwest, an annual festival that combines Interactive, Music and Film, all tied together with the new, expanding Trade Show floor. Of course, Backbone was right in the middle of it, demonstrating “Internet Radio Simplified” for the crowds.

Naturally, we were delighted being the only turnkey Internet radio station provider in the event, and even more pleased so often to hear “there’s nothing else like what Backbone does”. So that’s why we bring a mobile studio to these events, to show attendees how quickly and easily they can be on the air. And because everything they need for a remote broadcast fits into a backpack (Mac+mixer+mics), setup time is only a couple of minutes.

Build on relationships with our partners to provide greater services and features for our member stations.

We think we did pretty well on both counts. We met student radio representatives from a number of large universities, all of whom voiced that being part of the IBS-SRN would be a major upgrade for their radio clubs.

On the partnership front, we can’t say too much here, but we’re continuing to make good progress for your Backbone-hosted station. For example, in the area of delivery, not only is your station now available in both the TuneIn and iTunes radio tuners, but we expect to soon have your station become available on a new service that allows your listeners to actually record your shows for later listening, just like time shifting TV programs on your DVR. We also met up with our friends from the Public Radio Exchange who tell us that they are getting quite a reception for their Public Radio Remix efforts that is available on XM/123, terrestrially and on the Internet.

IBS NYC 2012The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System’s annual National Conference at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania pulled in students and advisers from all over the country, the largest contingent being a dozen who flew in from Champs Charter High School in Los Angeles. Champs’ AER station is currently the IBS-SRN’s most listened-to station, and with this kind of involvement, we can see why. Plus, with so many compelling sessions running simultaneously, it takes a crew to cover them all adequately.

One thing we took away from this year’s conference is that we need another live broadcast position/station on our Radio Row, where students sign up for a 1-hour air shift on their own station or on the designated demo Internet radio station. The signup sheet filled up in a very short period, and we want to accommodate all who are interested.

Because of the conference schedule, I didn’t personally get to see all of the live broadcasts, but the ones I did see were animated and great radio. One of my favorites was the SUNY Fredonia group (pictured below) who jumped into the Backbone-driven Mac station for the first time and made it look like they were veterans of the system within a couple of minutes. My other was the polished high school crew from Champs who interviewed Steely Dan’s guitarist Jon Herington and his band and persuaded them to do a live mini-concert for their AER audience.

We want to thank Cedric Watson and Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus (member station WLIU-BK) for hosting our annual pre-conference Network affiliates meeting. And thanks for giving all of the attendees a tour of your very cool facilities. Of course, the meeting was followed by a tour of Brooklyn’s Junior’s Cheesecake across the street.

It was great to see representatives from so many of our stations’ schools, including Towson, CUNY Lehman, Baton Rouge’s Tara High School, College of the Desert, Simmons College and so many more. Thanks to all who attended and participated, and we’ll see all of you at a regional IBS conference near you in the fall.

With this gift, KCOD, launched in the Spring of 2011, is the newest member station in the IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone (IBS-SRN). The school notes that the station “has generated tremendous interest from students, broadcast professionals, potential sponsors, local politicians and the surrounding community.” See more on the KCOD blog.Listen to KCOD online.

From Wikipedia:John Tesh is an American pianist and composer of pop music, as well as a radio host and television presenter. His 10-year-old ‘Intelligence for Your Life Radio Show‘ reaches 14.2 Million listeners/week, and is syndicated by Teshmedia on 400 stations in US, Canada, and the UK. Tesh has won six music Emmys, has four gold albums, two Grammy nominations, and an Associated Press award for investigative journalism. Tesh has sold over eight million records. His live concerts have raised more than $20 million for PBS. His NBC Basketball Theme has been hailed as one of the top three sports themes of all time. He is also known as the longtime co-host of the television program Entertainment Tonight. He has previously worked as a sportscaster for the Olympic Games, a news anchor and a reporter.

Backbone and IBS-SRN member station hosts Nicole Murphy from WLIU-BK Brooklyn and Alyssa DiNubila from WNEK Spingfield, MA were part of TALKERS magazine “It’s Time to Talk Day” — a massive radio row raising awareness about Domestic Violence, produced in association with its sister firm, Talk Radio News Service, and the corporate sponsorship of Liz Claiborne, Inc.

Held last week (12/8/11) in the fashion showroom of the Midtown Manhattan corporate offices of Liz Claiborne, Inc., the ambitious event was one of the largest and most successful, bringing together more than 20 talk media hosts from around the country who broadcasted their shows live or recorded interviews for delayed broadcast.

Alyssa and Nicole had the opportunity to interview Wanda Lucibello, Faranaz Rodriguez , Napur Argarwal, among others, during the two hour event and rebroadcast on their home stations and made available to all the stations on the Student Radio Network. It is also content that can be replayed later on any of the stations on the network.

This was a great event for Backbone and members of the Student Radio Network because it emphasized the benefits of being part of our network and how easy it is to set up and run a live remote. We anticipate doing a number of these in the future starting with a live remote from the NH primary early next month. Watch for more on that in the near future.

ZUMIX is an East Boston-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building community through music and the arts. Their core belief is that music is the most powerful means of developing adolescent self-identity. Their award-winning music and creative technology programming is designed to equip youth with the tools necessary to reach their full potential, while creating a safe space for youth to explore who they are and who they want to be. Through community events, ZUMIX provides access to top-quality arts experiences for a low-income, under-served neighborhood.

Thanks to the IBS-SRN members at WLIU-BK, Long Island University, Brooklyn, for their dynamic demonstration of Internet radio broadcasting at the CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival in New York City, October 20-24th. This was the first time our network came to exhibit at CMJ, and we’ll be back for many more of these great events.